Linking human consciousness to a computer cloud with the capability of reading everyone’s thoughts simultaneously could lead to “totalitarian mind control,” warns philosopher Slavoj Zizek.
With fears growing that artificial intelligence will eventually dominate and maybe even exterminate humanity, Zizek, the senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, is sounding the alarm.
Zizek pointed out that MIT has already developed a “helmet” that can read your thoughts and reproduce them in writing or an artificial voice.
Arnav Kapur, a student in MIT’s Media Lab, has developed a system to surf the internet with his mind. He silently Googled our questions and heard the answers through vibrations transmitted through his skull and into his inner ear. pic.twitter.com/aN76Jn4AHv
While such technology appears harmless if it is voluntary, Zizek asks what would happen if it was deployed “without you knowing it?”
“The next step in this “utopia” will be a computer that can read my thoughts and your thoughts that can connect us so that we can share our thoughts. If you and I are connected through the same computer, I can literally participate in your thinking directly without any external communication like word typing,” he writes.
Zizek said he found the prospect of this mass shared consciousness “pretty horrifying” because it would totally destroy freedom of thought and individuality.
He provides two mundane examples of how such technology would ruin basic human interaction.
“All flirting will be out. I meet someone and instead of all the lovely games of erotic hints she can read ‘I want to go to bed with you’ and the eroticism will disappear.
Another simple example is everyday politeness. Let’s say we know each other but we are not mega-close friends. I see you on the street and say the usual polite things like: “hello, how are you? I am glad to meet you.” But if you can read my mind this is nonsense because this is politeness and I do not mean it. Usually, I do not care how you feel.”
As we have previously documented, futurists like Ray Kurzweil have openly stated their plans to achieve the singularity by uploading their brains to computers and escaping death.
In his book, the Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil made clear that such technology will not be available to the general public, who will at best live on as a slave class to the elite.
NBC News celebrated the prospect of “millions” of people getting a microchip implanted in their hand as a likely future outcome.
The segment is introduced by pointing out that people who have taken the chip do not need to carry keys, ID, credit cards or money.
It points out that embedding microchips in humans has long been a feature of dystopian fiction like Black Mirror, but that in Sweden “the microchips are already here.”
The piece also celebrates how the same contactless technology has “made cash pretty much obsolete in Sweden.”
A woman is seen receiving an implanted microchip while commenting, “I thought it would be fun, right?”
“The process is simple and swift, a pinch of the skin and in a matter of seconds the chip is inserted – the transformation is completely, the reporter Sarah Harman breezily comments as a man receiving the implant says he felt no pain.
In a half-hearted stab at objectivity, the piece then features two brief interviews from Swedes who offer lukewarm opposition.
With 5,000-10,000 people having already been chipped in Sweden, a biohacker then predicts that “millions of people will find it very valuable” to get chipped in the future.
“Human microchipping may be our future but in Sweden it’s already a reality,” concludes Harman.
China Unveils ‘Super Surveillance Camera’ That Can Link To Its Social Credit System
Published
2 months ago
on
27 September, 2019
Steve Watson
Device can identify individual faces out of crowds of tens of thousands; Will take mass surveillance to a new level
A new camera with a resolution five times more detailed than the human eye, able to monitor thousands of people in real time and identify individual faces has been unveiled by Chinese scientists, prompting renewed fears about mass surveillance.
ABC News in Australia reports that the new 500 megapixel cloud camera AI system, dubbed a ‘super camera’, was revealed at China’s International Industry Fair last week.
The camera system, equipped with state of the art facial recognition utilities, was designed by Fudan University and Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The designers claim that the system can detect and identify thousands of human faces or other objects in real time and instantly locate specific targets in environments such as crowded stadiums.
Of course, it would work equally as well at protests.
The designers suggested that police could set up the camera system in the center of Shanghai and monitor the movement of crowds, while cross-checking the images with medical and criminal records.
Li Daguang, a professor at the National Defense University of the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing told the Global Times that the system could “very easily be applied to national defense, military and public security.”
Technology like this in the hands of Communist Chinese authorities, who already operate a citizen social credit system, does not bode well for privacy rights and freedom.
“The Party-state has massive databases of people’s images and the capability to connect them to their identity, so it isn’t inconceivable that technology like this is possible if not now then in the future,” Samantha Hoffman, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute noted.
The social credit system, which rewards ‘good behavior’ with incentives and punishes disobedience by restricting and banning people from buying travel tickets, is currently enforced using a vast network of over 200 million surveillance cameras, as well as other tracking tools.
However, the 500 million pixel ‘super camera’ would take surveillance capabilities to a different level.
Scientists noted that the current crop of cameras are able to monitor thousands of people at once, but each face is in the wide shot can only be represented by a few pixels, meaning “you couldn’t clearly see your targeted person at all”.
The data from the video will be “fed into a pool of data that, combined with AI processing, can generate tools for social control, including tools linked to the Social Credit System” said the ASPI’s Hoffman.
Of course, this kind of thing is all fine because it’s all the way away in China, right?
Google’s announcement that it has achieved “quantum supremacy” with a 53-qubit quantum computer greases the skids for all cryptocurrency and military secrets protected by cryptography to be breakable in a stunning new development that will change the world.
The Big Tech corporation’s new quantum processor took a mere 200 seconds to complete a computing task that would normally require 10,000 years on a supercomputer.
The 53-qubit quantum computer can break any 53-bit cryptography in seconds, meaning Bitcoin’s 256-bit encryption is vulnerable once Google scales its quantum computing to 256 qubits, something their own scientists say will be possible by 2022.
Modern military cryptography will also eventually be rendered obsolete given that the number of qubits in Google’s quantum computers will double at least every year, according to the report, growing at “double exponential rate,” which is even faster than Moore’s Law.
At this rate, Google will be able to break all military encryption by 2024, a frightening prospect given the company’s close ties to China.
The prospects of Google controlling such vast supercomputer power when it applies to the field of surveillance is also chilling.
“Google will rapidly come to dominate the world, controlling most of the money, all speech, all politics, most science and technology, most of the news media and all public officials,” writes Mike Adams.
“Google will become the dominant controlling authoritarian force on planet Earth, and all humans will be subservient to its demands. Democracy, truth and freedom will be annihilated.”
Read Adams’ full article for a comprehensive breakdown of what this means for the future – a beast system controlled by Google that makes Skynet look amateur in comparison, controls all secrets, communications and financial transactions.
Google has come a long way from “don’t be evil” to establishing a monopoly over technology that will literally allow them to become the most dominant force on the planet.
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